Years of combat are felt in San Antonio

A portrait of Anthony Scott Miller, who, at age 19, became the first San Antonio casualty in Operation Iraqi Freedom, rests by his headstone at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery on Tuesday, April 7, 2009.

When the invasion of Iraq began, many soldiers figured the conflict would be short and easily won.

Instead, it became one of the longest wars in American history, and its aftermath is deeply felt in San Antonio and Texas.

At Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery, the headstones of those killed in Iraq number 46.

“I do think about my son every day and I go out to the cemetery two to three times a month,” said Patrick Miller, the father of Army Pfc. Anthony Scott Miller, the first native of San Antonio to die in the war. “I think of the good times that we had together with family. I think of what could have been.”

His son was struck by missile near Baghdad in 2003. He was 19.

Tikrit. Taji. Balad. These far-off places in Iraq became all too familiar to soldiers and their families as the years passed.

Deployment ceremonies and welcome-home parties grew more routine. Hardly a weekend went by in San Antonio without a fundraiser to send gifts and care packages to the troops.

The Pentagon pumped billions into the war and some of it transformed San Antonio and its three military installations.

As a trickle of wounded turned into a steady stream, the city's two military hospitals began to fill with troops whose life-altering injuries required long and intensive rehabilitation.

Combat medics, doctors and technicians came here to train.

The city became a hub of medical care for active-duty troops, and what was known as BAMC now is larger than it was in 2003 and bears a new name: the San Antonio Military Medical Center.

It's home to the Defense Department's sole military burn unit and has a $457 million trauma tower.

There's also the $62 million Center for the Intrepid, a high-rise that opened at Fort Sam in 2006. There, badly wounded troops — many recovering from burns and amputations — work months and years trying to restart their lives.

Four Fisher Houses now are home for families of the wounded.

It wasn't just the government that took action.

Volunteers, some of them people with deep ties to the military and others who had never met a GI, jumped at the chance to help.

“At the time of our son's death we didn't have any kind of support system to get through the grief and the unknowing that that lay ahead,” said Smith, 46, of San Antonio. “Everything that we faced, there was nothing out there at the time because everything was so new.”

A badly disfigured GI in his wheelchair or walking gingerly on a computerized prosthetic limb might come as shock in some places but not here.

“On a national level, I tell people how welcoming San Antonio is,” said Shilo Harris, a survivor of a 2007 roadside bomb blast in Iraq who suffered third-degree burns over 35 percent of his body and lost three fingers.

He has had 50 surgeries, with several more to go.

“I do a lot of motivational speaking around the nation and I want to tell you I can't imagine being anywhere else but San Antonio, Harris, 36, of Floresville added. “The community is such a welcoming community to the seriously injured.”